Monthly Archives: May 2017

Post navigation

I feel old friendships changing, some diminishing in affection and interest, some fading in that crucial dimension of the interest we show in each others’ lives, and thus, threatening to vanish into insignificance. Some because of lack of attention, of the tender loving care that is needed to nurture relationships; some we have tried and tried and strained to keep alive, only to find them sputtering out, impervious to our ostensibly tender affections; some because, somehow, in some mysterious way, my friends and I have come to divine that we are changing, growing apart, irrevocably–and have withdrawn from each other, to set out on other paths, cutting our costs as we do so. We have been exposed to the–possibly clichéd–wisdom that friendships, like other relationships, take us from one station in life to another, and we sense the destination station is at hand. And then there are physical barriers of time and space; sometimes thousands of miles and multiple time-zones, sometimes even with the same city or country or state; I have lived in three countries, my reach extends, bringing me the joy of contact with the far flung, but also the melancholy of separation. I am growing older; I am a parent; at home, a human demands nurturing and rearing; an involvement that makes unprecedented demands on my commitments in time and energy. I willingly acquiesce. This sucks up the oxygen from other quarters; I do not seem to mind. There are new relationships now, ones demanding their own special species of nurturance.

This is a familiar, middle-aged lament. I’ve heard variants of it before; now, it’s my turn to join the chorus. This is not a wholly unfamiliar place to be; I’ve experienced variants of it before, at my life’s previous ‘stages.’ If there is a novelty to the precinct I have now entered, it is because my current melancholia–and I suspect that of others who make observations similar to mine–is infected with intimations of mortality. There might be no time for ‘reconciliation,’ for ‘rebuilding’; perhaps the changes we have observed in our relationships are irrevocable. It was a pleasant fantasy of years gone by that mistakes and catastrophes could always be put right somehow, that there was time and energy aplenty at hand. That illusion is no longer sustainable; our bodies have sent many intimations informing us of their lack of fidelity to our avowed goals; time has speeded up alarmingly; we now know that many of the farewells we will bid others will be final ones. (I suspect some of the notes I strike here might be a little overwrought; I am, after all, not confined to a retirement home or a hospice. Still.)

If there is a consolation in this state of affairs, it is the joy of new friendships; they do not replace the older ones, but fill my life in other ways. They address my changing person; they inform me of what I am becoming. And what I’m leaving behind.

Property appears an abstract, transcendent, metaphysical concept from afar but on closer inspection reveals itself to be legally constructed. Like ‘person,’ property obtains its philosophical traction from a legal, economic, and social imperative to distribute resources, and thus, wealth and power. As a canonical legal textbook puts it, the “property system” that results from a particular set of legal arrangements can “order relations”; it can “confer benefits and impose burdens.” The law describes how it is acquired by discovery, capture, creation, being found, adverse possession, and gift. These accommodations of property are so fundamental that property is written into our conceptions of ourselves, in claims that “every man has a property in his own person.”

This taxonomy of ways of acquiring property highlight particular modes of interaction with the world in terms of their property creation properties: ‘this way of interacting with the world counts as an acquisition of property if it meets the requisite legal conditions’; the workings of the common law of property are refinements, over an extended period of time, of these interactions. Law thus provides a specification of the conditions under which humans interact with the world to bring property into being, and how other humans should accordingly interact with a world in which property exists, if they are to avoid particular consequences arising from regulations that preserve the categorization of particular objects as property. (Computer software—in its binary and text forms—had to be legally demarcated as ‘ownable’ and ‘copyrightable’ before it could be termed ‘property’ of any kind.) These consequences could, for instance, interfere with ends and purposes served by the provision of private property. The law of property demarcates a range of possible actions and restrictions on our freedom; various pushings, proddings, and pokings of the world become illicit because they may constitute, for instance, ‘trespass on chattels.’ This categorization of the world into property and not-property acquires ontological significance: property becomes part of our socially constructed reality, reconfigurable if social needs change.

Property is not discovered; it is made, not by the act of mixing labor with supposedly ‘fallow land,’ as Locke would have had it, but by the scaffolding provided by the surrounding legal system. Property is a wholly positivistic legal concept; it makes a supposedly natural right ‘real’ and acquires its ontological weight from law. The legal conceptions of property are indifferent to the kinds of property system they create: different sets of rules create different systems, with different balances of power for owners and others; such allocations of property might lock in and preserve existing power relations.

The best justifications—philosophical ones—for system of property are pragmatic, outcome oriented ones. There is no ‘natural’ or ‘objective’ independent basis upon which to rest the ‘protection’ of property:

The property concept had no determinate meaning or positive content. It was a contingent decision whether the owner of the factory machinery should also own the products of the factory, or whether the owner also should control the management of the plant. [Gary Peller, The Metaphysics of American Law, 73 Cal. L. Rev. 1151 (1985)]

Time again, for a teaching self-evaluation. This semester, I taught three classes, and ran three independent studies. This workload was a mistake. I use the term ‘mistake’ because I signed up for those independent studies; that is, I chose to over commit myself. I had foolishly imagined I would be able to do justice to these multiple commitments; I soon found not I could not keep up. The result was one of the most disorganized semesters I’ve ever suffered–or made others suffer. The time taken up by class meetings–including the discussion sessions with my independent study students–and class preparations, reading weekly written responses, grading, office hours, and so on, quickly swamped many other commitments; and I failed to respond with adequate organization. (Yes, that dreaded ‘time-management.’) My students felt this lack of disorganization; I constantly felt harried, underprepared, late, and negligent. Several students complained to me that I did not respond to their emails in time; in each case, they were correct. I also committed the mistake–out of sheer emotion and physical weariness–of not sticking to my specified restrictions on assignment deadlines; the result was a blizzard of late submissions and resubmissions. Which of course just further increased my sense of disorganization. One manifestation of my harried feeling this semester was that I walked out of a class meeting when it became apparent to me no one had done the reading; I’ve done this three times in my fifteen years at Brooklyn College, and on each occasion, the fury I evinced left me feeling empty and spent. And my students bewildered.

What went well? I enjoyed great classroom interactions–of varying kinds–with two out of my three classes. Two of my three independent studies went well in terms of the quality of the discussions I had with my students. I used new syllabi for all classes; this was required for one class, which was new, while the other received makeovers; and in general, my selections–four ‘religious novels’ for my Philosophical Issues in Literature class; Plato, Hume, and Nietzsche for my Landmarks in Philosophy class; and Marx, Weber, and Durkheim for my Social Philosophy class–went over well with my students. (Some students, quite understandably, found the assigned readings from Weber a little too dry.) Many students impressed me with the quality of their responses to the readings, and by the sophistication and thoughtfulness of their papers. Some told me they enjoyed my teaching; an affirmation that is always gratifying. Some of these responses, to be honest, brought tears to my eyes; they included comments about my ‘passion for teaching’ and how I had ‘taught them a lot.’ I do not think I can adequately convey my emotional state on hearing my students express themselves so openly and emotionally to me in these personal and private encounters. I also think I did a good job in my one-on-one interactions with students when going over their papers with them; almost everyone I worked with told me they found these sessions useful.

So, another semester of learning–in both directions–comes to a close. Teaching remains my greatest philosophical passion; and my partners in this enterprise–my students–continue to enrich my engagement with philosophical thinking. I’m looking forward to the summer’s travel and writing plans, but I’m also looking forward to the teaching in the fall–more new syllabi, more unread books to be worked through. Hopefully, I’ll be a little wiser then too, and will have learned from this semester’s mistakes.

Over the past couple of days, I have engaged in a time-honored academic ritual: the cleaning of one’s office. Old books, journal articles, student papers and blue books, random handouts from academic talks, conference badges–all fodder for the recycling bin. But I went further, looking for especially archaic material; and I found it in my graduate school notebooks. Scribbled notes from graduate seminars filled their pages; but much else too. In their pockets I found syllabi and handouts; and on their back pages, many, many notes written to myself during the seminar class period.

Some of these notes are simple reminders to myself: submit forms, pick up checks, finish reading etc. Yet others are financial calculations; in graduate school, I always lived on the edge, and frequent checks of my financial health were necessary. These, as can be seen, often distracted me even as I thought about metaphysics and ethics. And then, perhaps most poignantly, I find little injunctions and plans for self-improvement: eat more of this, eat less of that, run more, workout regularly, reading and writing schedules, smoke less or quit; and on and on. Sometimes I offer exhortations or admonitions to myself. These blueprints for a new me occur with some regularity; they represent a recurring concern of mine.

Those concerns and the ways in which I negotiate with them persist.

I still make lists of plans, I still draw up schedules of work and abstinence; I’m still struggling. Now, you can find the blueprints I speak of in my hard drive, tucked away into files; I don’t scribble them anymore. But I continue to obsess over how I can get over this weakness, this flaw, this thing that is ‘holding me back’; I continue to obsess over how I can ‘change’ and ‘improve’ and be ‘better.’ When I see my notebooks, I see that I’m fighting many of the same battles that I used to fight back then; against distraction, anxiety, lack of discipline in my personal habits, in my ‘work ethic.’ I used to dream of transcending these, of moving on; it seems like I still am. Perhaps battles that have been waged this long are indicators of persistent failure on my part, a depressing thought at the best of times.

I’ve often written on this blog about the difficulties and myths of ‘self-improvement’; perhaps talk of ‘self-improvement’ is a sham, a distracting disturbance that does not allow us to become truly comfortable with, and accepting of, ourselves. Perhaps we have not reconciled ourselves to who we are. But perhaps that’s who I am, the kind of person who will always be obsessed with making these kinds of changes and ‘improvements,’ who will never make them, or never in the way that I want, but yet never accept ‘defeat’ or ‘get the hint.’ In that case, perhaps the best way for me to accept who I am, to ‘become who you are!‘ is to not disdain this activity of constantly plotting and scheming to escape myself. To engage in it is to be me.

Over at the MIT Sloan Management Review, H. James Wilson, Paul R. Daugherty, and Nicola Morini-Bianzino strike an optimistic note as they respond to the “distressing picture” created by “the threat that automation will eliminate a broad swath of jobs across the world economy [for] as artificial intelligence (AI) systems become ever more sophisticated, another wave of job displacement will almost certainly occur.” Wilson, Daugherty, and Morini-Bianzino suggest that we’ve been “overlooking” the fact that “many new jobs will also be created — jobs that look nothing like those that exist today.” They go on to identify three key positions:

Trainers

This first category of new jobs will need human workers to teach AI systems how they should perform — and it is emerging rapidly. At one end of the spectrum, trainers help natural-language processors and language translators make fewer errors. At the other end, they teach AI algorithms how to mimic human behaviors.

Explainers

The second category of new jobs — explainers — will bridge the gap between technologists and business leaders. Explainers will help provide clarity, which is becoming all the more important as AI systems’ opaqueness increases.

Sustainers

The final category of new jobs our research identified — sustainers — will help ensure that AI systems are operating as designed and that unintended consequences are addressed with the appropriate urgency.

Unfortunately for these claims, it is all too evident that these positions themselves are vulnerable to automation. That is, future trainers, explainers, and sustainers–if their job descriptions match the ones given above–will also be automated. Nothing in those descriptions indicates that humans are indispensable components of the learning processes they are currently facilitating.

Consider that the ’empathy trainer’ Koko is a machine-learning system which “can help digital assistants such as Apple’s Siri and Amazon’s Alexa address people’s questions with sympathy and depth.” Currently Koko is being trained by a human; but it will then go on to teach Siri and Alexa. Teachers are teaching future teachers how to be teachers; after which they will teach on their own. Moreover, there is no reason why chatbots, which currently need human trainers, cannot be trained–as they already are–on increasingly large corpora of natural language texts like the collections of the world’s libraries (which consist of human inputs.)

Or consider that explainers may rely on an algorithmic system like “the Local Interpretable Model-Agnostic Explanations (LIME), which explains the underlying rationale and trustworthiness of a machine prediction”; human analysts use its output to “pinpoint the data that led to a particular result.” But why wouldn’t LIME’s functioning be enhanced to do the relevant ‘pinpointing’ itself, thus obviating the need for a human analyst?

Finally, note that “AI may become more self-governing….an AI prototype named Quixote…can learn about ethics by reading simple stories….the system is able to “reverse engineer” human values through stories about how humans interact with one another. Quixote has learned…why stealing is not a good idea….even given such innovations, human ethics compliance managers will play a critical role in monitoring and helping to ensure the proper operation of advanced systems.” This sounds like the roles and responsibilities for humans in this domain will decrease over time.

There is no doubt that artificial intelligence systems require human inputs, supervision, training, and maintenance; but those roles are diminishing, not increasing; short-term, local, requirements for human skills will not necessarily translate into long-term, global, ones. The economic impact of the coming robotics and artificial intelligence ‘revolution’ is still unclear.

My family and I have gone hiking on several occasions. While on them, a general pattern emerges–I normally walk ahead of my wife and daughter. When my daughter was a toddler, though she did walk for some short stints, at most times my wife carried her on her back in an Ergo carrier; now my daughter walks on by herself for the entire trail. In the ‘old days,’ my daughter often required some persuasion to continue; such persuasion was more charitably and kindly dispensed by my wife; as such, she became the primary caretaker during a hike. Moreover, because my daughter would not let me carry her, a straightforward manifestation of her preference of her mother’s caretaking, my wife also became the primary carrier and beast of burden. (Her child-carrying feats evoked many cries of admiration from fellow hikers who were battling the switchbacks in Jasper and Banff National Parks in Canada in the summer of 2015; my daughter was then three and a half years old, and weighed in at a hefty thirty-five pounds.)

And so, on the trail, we set off together, but a gap slowly emerges between the two ‘groups.’ As it grows, I stop to let my companions catch up; sometimes I cannot even hear their voices behind me, and though the silences and the calm of the woods and the slopes are especially calming and thought-provoking, I still hanker for the familiar pleasures of hearing my wife and my child talking to each other. Somewhere deep within me is buried the fear that we will lose each other; that my wife and daughter will wander off into some cul-de-sac; that the prudent thing for me to do is to continue to provide them close company. So I cease motion; I take off my backpack, and rest on a boulder or tree stump. I look back along the trail, waiting for them to hove into view. If the gap has grown, it may take a minute or two before I can hear them again; it certainly takes a while before I can spot them again. Sometimes they are obscured by the woods; sometimes by the curvature and the bends and twists and turns of the landscapes.

Then, finally, as I hear my daughter’s high-pitched voice grows louder, I see them emerge from the woods, make the turn around the bend, up the path, through the trees. They see me, and our expressions light up in unison; we are happy and, yes, relieved to see each other. Sometimes, having spotted them, I move on; sometimes, we all stop for a break. We swap stories of what we have seen and heard; we know we move through the same landscape but our experiences are quite different.

It never gets old; that complex feeling, when I see my wife and daughter reappear, of a quiet happiness tempered with a relief that has grown in response to the tiniest of terrors. Here, in the wilderness, we are happy to be with each other again–even if only momentarily separated. We realize, thanks to that particular and peculiar reminder that only the wilderness can provide, of just how much we mean to each other.

Perhaps because it has been over three decades, memories of the ginormous political clusterfuck that went by the name of Iran-Contra seem to have faded from our collective memory. As our nation’s polity lurches from one scandal to the next, and as cries of ‘impeachment, if not now, then when?‘ fill the air, it is worth reminding ourselves of just how badly things seemed to be going–back in the 1980s–for another US President, and how, miraculously, he survived:

The scandal began as an operation to free seven American hostages being held in Lebanon by Hezbollah, a paramilitary group with Iranian ties….Israel would ship weapons to Iran, and then the United States would resupply Israel and receive the Israeli payment….a portion of the proceeds from the weapon sales was diverted to fund anti-Sandinista, or Contras, in Nicaragua.…Reagan was aware of potential hostage transfers with Iran, as well as the sale of Hawk and TOW missiles…. large volumes of documents relating to the scandal were destroyed or withheld from investigators by Reagan administration officials….Several investigations ensued, including by the U.S. Congress and the three-person, Reagan-appointed Tower Commission. Neither found any evidence that President Reagan himself knew of the extent of the multiple programs….the sale of weapons to Iran was not deemed a criminal offense but charges were brought against five individuals for their support of the Contras. Those charges, however, were later dropped because the administration refused to declassify certain documents. The indicted conspirators faced various lesser charges instead….fourteen administration officials were indicted, including then-Secretary of DefenseCaspar Weinberger. Eleven convictions resulted, some… vacated on appeal. The rest of those indicted or convicted were all pardoned in the final days of the presidency of George H. W. Bush.

No criminal charges were ever laid against the US President, and then, as now, the only institutional pressure that could be brought to bear was a Congressional and independent investigation. It did not seem credible that Reagan would survive the scandal. But he did. Obfuscation, denial, selective loss of memory, underlings willing and able to cover-up; these all aided in the Gipper‘s Great Escape. Selling arms to Iran in 1986, six years after American hostages had been freed in Tehran was outrageous; doing so illegally, in order to aid another clandestine operation that involved negotiating with a ‘terrorist organization’ to release American hostages, was beyond the pale. It was that era’s ‘collusion with the Russians,’ that era’s ‘hacking of our elections.’ But after the smoke cleared, matters proceeded much as before; before the nation’s disbelieving eyes, no charges stuck. The capacity of the nation’s political institutions to pay host to, and absorb, considerable wrong-doing was demonstrated rather spectacularly then; and we may bear further witness to their capacity for doing so. Damaged, limping, presidencies that barely make it to the finish line are not unknown in American political history; this could be one of those. If we are lucky, its ability to wreak further damage on the polity will have been considerably diminished.